How to write a good brief for your PR pitch

Holding a PR pitch? The first step is to invite PR Agency One (Joke! Sort of…) The first most important step is writing a robust PR brief, which will save yourself and the shortlisted agencies a lot of time and effort. Holding a PR pitch is time consuming and costly for both agency and client so it is important to get it right.

As much as I would like to say the client is always right, sometimes PR briefs simply don’t communicate what the client is after. While a good PR agency will interrogate a brief and ask questions to get to the heart of the problem, there are some that don’t want to ask the wrong thing and will try and muddle through a brief. Or they’ll have made wrong assumptions, making their presentation woefully off topic.

Writing a PR brief should help you to decide who to invite to the pitch.

In my experience a good PR brief needs the following:

• Background on the company, competitors, marketplace • Detail on your corporate objectives and marketing objectives • Who you’re trying to reach with the PR activity – ie your end-user audiences and stakeholders • Media channels or specific media titles you feel are important – these might differ from what the agency thinks is important • Overview of the other marketing channels • What has worked in the past and what hasn’t? • Expected outcomes (different to objectives) – what would a picture of success look like? • Measurement: is there any existing measurement in place? • Who would be the agencies point of contact? • Budget – and try and be specific here • Timings

Please keep it short. Two or three pages max.

Definitely avoid procurement departments if you can. Every procurement led PR brief that I have seen issued has been so prescriptive that it has smashed to smithereens any chance of the PR campaign being innovative and has instead led to template PR responses winning through.